Pasta with Nduja, Shrimps, & Cherry Tomatoes

The countdown is on…..We leave for Umbria in just two weeks, so my meal planning involves trying to clean out my refrigerator and freezer before we leave. I had some frozen shrimp in the freezer, and some nduja leftover in my refrigerator that I decided would be a great combination in a pasta dish. If you are not familiar with it, Nduja is a soft, spreadable Calabrian salami that has a kick. When we are in Italy, Nduja is pretty available, and I can find it in both the fresh form as well as in jars. In North America however, Nduja is much more difficult to find so I order mine from Nduja Artisans. (They also sell truffle salami and lardo!)

This pasta is one that can be put together in minutes, in fact, I start the sauce after I put the pasta water on to boil. I used casarecce pasta, which is a short, twisted pasta shape, but you could use just about any pasta shape in this recipe including spaghetti. This is a quick and easy pasta dish that can be adjusted depending on how spicy you like your food. I recommend starting out with a quarter cup of Nduja to start with, and then add more if you like more heat. We like things fairly spicy, so I use about a third of a cup of this amazing spicy salami in our pasta. My shrimps were large in size, so I just cut them into three pieces so the size matched the pasta, but if you use medium-sized shrimp, you can leave them whole. The only trick to this pasta is to barely cook the cherry tomatoes and shrimp so that the tomatoes hold their shape and the shrimps remain tender.